Many business owners and managers in the UK and elsewhere tend to view the online marketing of their business and products as a one-off requirement that is fulfilled simply by having a website designed for them, and placing it on the Internet. Unfortunately, those who do actually think this way couldn’t be more wrong!

The essential facts of the Internet immediately destroys this view about web marketing:

Your website is almost certainly not the only one in its field, and for most sites, it will be one of thousands, perhaps millions, of websites available over the internet. Unless your site is hugely well known because of your brand (like Tesco, Coca Cola or Apple), most potential users of your site, and potential customers of your products will not know who you are or your site’s address. The online marketing of your site therefore must at least consider how people will find you, which today is primarily by using search engines like Google and Yahoo.

The Internet changes literally every day. People’s behaviour changes, the search engines and other facilities that help people find websites change, your competition changes what they are doing, and new competitors enter the market, constantly. Because the Internet is this huge constantly changing environment, to properly market your site cannot be done as a one-off job; it has to be a continuous process monitoring what is happening and then reacting to it, as well as involving proactive promotion and anticipating trends. Be very very wary of anyone offering a one-off solution, because by definition it is a wrong methodology!

To be able to be found on the Internet, and to keep being able to be found, requires ongoing work on your site, with continuous tweaking of design and content to keep it up to date, dealing with your customer needs and perceptions, as well as the site’s relevancy to these so other people and online resources like search engines can determine quickly what your site is about. There is an equal demand for off-site work to be done about your site however, because nothing is isolated on the net, and the search engines, for instance, know this. What other people and websites say about your site, directly affects how easy it is to find. If no one ever refers (and links) to your site, your site will be deemed unpopular, and accordingly it will be hard to find. Yes, the Internet has become a sort of popularity contest!

Making and keeping your website relevant and popular in the Internet’s constantly changing environment is hard and ongoing work, and because there is so much to know and do to do it right and to keep up to date with doing it right, it is almost impossible for one person to do it unless they spend all their time doing it!

This is why there is a web marketing industry and why it takes specialists in the field now to have a hope of keeping up with the break-neck speed of change. SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation, Specialists primarily focus on a website’s relevancy and popularity, both on-site and off-site. Typically SEO includes on-site relevancy works, ie ‘optimising’ the website’s content so information is available in the right places on the site to ensure search engines like Google will actually be able to automatically find out what the site is about, combined with off-site relevancy and popularity works in the forms of inbound links, and up to date and referring content through articles, blog posts and social media. Web Marketing, which one could say includes SEO, tends to be focused more on promotion and maximising the return on that promotion (ROI), which can include articles, blog posts and other referring content, social media and paid advertising, such as banner ads or forms of pay-per-click like Google Adwords. As you can see there is some cross-over between SEO and web marketing, but the purposes behind the work is different for each of them. Social media for example, can be used for SEO to provide referring content and a link, and it can be used for web marketing to enhance and define a brand, promote products and drive visitors to a website. One social media account, multiple purposes!

Bear in mind also that with SEO and web marketing, as with many things, the devil is in the detail, and those little but often fundamental details are both many and constantly in a state of change.

This is where Freetimers Web Marketing comes in. 2012 is our 15th anniversary, and we have been working, as a company, in SEO and online marketing for 15 years. We’re about as expert in this field as they get, and the results we attain show this is true, and that the 50+ years of combined experience of our Northampton web marketing and search engine optimisation team really does make a big difference. Our preference is to provide our clients with an on-going service that will achieve results for them, and we continuously improve their results over time.

If you’re Internet marketing is not up to scratch, and you feel you need a proper partner to start achieving your longer term online goals, contact our web marketing and SEO Northampton team on 01604-626477.